Researcher Faked Evidence of Human Cloning, Koreans Report

Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, the South Korean researcher who claimed to have cloned human cells, fabricated evidence for all of that research, according to a report released today by a Seoul National University panel investigating his work.

The finding strips any possibility of legitimate achievement in human cell cloning from a researcher who had been propelled to international celebrity and whose promise to make paralyzed people walk had been engraved on a Korean postage stamp.

In his string of splashy papers, his one legitimate claim was to have cloned the dog he named Snuppy, the panel said.

"Dr. Hwang's team cannot avoid taking grave responsibility for fabricating its papers and concealing data," said Chung Myunghee, the head of the university's investigatory panel.

But that still left open the possibility that he had gotten the cloning technique to work to some degree, as he wrote in the report first announcing his success in an earlier article of March 2004. The panel has now found the 2004 article was also fabricated, according to wire service reports.

Dr. Hwang's professional demise is a severe embarrassment for the Korean government, which invested copiously in his laboratory and in making him a national hero. But the blow to Korea's scientific reputation abroad may be cushioned by the fact that other Korean institutions, notably the television program "PD Notebook" and a group of skeptical young Korean scientists, took the lead in discovering the problems with Dr. Hwang's work and in eventually forcing today's investigation by the university.

Dr. Hwang still has public support. Last night 150 people festooned trees and shrubs at the gate of Seoul National University with strips of yellow, blue and green cloth. Banners that were hung between the trees showed the Korean flag and slogans such as "The Pride of Korea" or "Biotechnology is Our Future."

Korean prosecutors, however, have banned Dr. Hwang and nine other South Korean scientists from leaving the country. They have said they will launch an investigation as soon as the university panel has announced its findings.

As for the field of embryonic stem cells, researchers in the United States say it should not be much affected in the long run, at least on a scientific level, since its theoretical promise is unchanged by one man's misdeeds.

In practical terms, however, the panel's new finding is a sharp setback for therapeutic cloning, the much discussed goal of converting a patient's own cells into new tissue to treat a wide variety of degenerative diseases from diabetes to heart disease. The technique for cloning human cells, which seemed to have been achieved since March 2004, now turns out not to exist at all, forcing cloning researchers back to square one.

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The Seoul panel's finding also raises the question of how an important but fabricated result could survive unchallenged, in a presumably rigorous and competitive scientific field, for almost two years.

Dr. Hwang's escapade may have prevented other researchers entering the field of human cloning because he seemed to have it all sewn up. "I have to admit that I decided not to push the efforts here at Stanford because it would have been almost unethical to work with human eggs if he had made the process so efficient," said Dr. Irving Weissman, a leading stem cell researcher.

Dr. Robert Lanza, vice president of Advanced Cell Technology, a Massachusetts company that had been active in the human cloning research, said the company's funding had dried up after Dr. Hwang claimed success in 2004.

One reason Dr. Hwang's results seemed credible is that he gave lectures in the United States in which he explained each step of his process. "He went through the exact method, telling people how to do it," Dr. Weissman said. Dr. Hwang also enlisted a leading American expert on cloning monkeys, Dr. Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh, as the senior co-author on his 2005 report, even though Dr. Schatten had done none of the experiments. "Everyone wondered how Schatten got to be the senior co-author, but his vouching for Hwang made it a little more likely," Dr. Weissman said.

Scientific journals play an important gatekeeping role in science by screening out fallacious reports. But Dr. Hwang's two reports on human cloning were published by Science and his claim to have cloned a dog was accepted by Nature, another leading journal and Science's rival in recruiting important papers. The editors of each journal has said in the Hwang case that the expert reviewers who scrutinize submitted manuscripts cannot be expected to detect fabricated data. Not everyone agrees.

"It sounds as though their processes were rather sloppy," said Dr. Benjamin Lewin, the founder and former editor of Cell, a biology journal known for its rigor. "At a minimum, Science should have been more careful and should never have reached the stage of publishing a paper with identical photos," he said, referring to the fact that some photos of cell colonies in Dr. Hwang's 2005 article were duplicates of one another.

Dr. Lewin said that a journal editor needed to develop an intimate knowledge of his reviewers' strengths and weaknesses, and that "Nature and Science don't have the reputation for rigorous review."

With Dr. Hwang's professional implosion, the goal of cloning human cells is once again open. Dr. George Daley, of Harvard Medical School, said there was no reason to suppose human cells could not be cloned, despite Dr. Hwang's failure to do so even with rich funding and copious supplies of human eggs.

Dr. Daley said that two laboratories at Harvard, his own and Dr. Kevin Eggan's, had been seeking approval for more than a year to clone human cells. Two groups in England are pursuing the same goal, one at Newcastle University and the other led by Ian Wilmut, the cloner of Dolly the sheep. Advanced Cell Technology, of Worcester, Massachusetts, is also back in the game. "I think it's just a matter of time before other groups produce this," Dr. Daley said, although he added that it may be a long time before anyone attains the level of efficiency claimed by Dr. Hwang.